page_title: Theory of National Struggle
section_title: Wartime nationalism: 1937–1949
hierarchical_section_title: Theory of National Struggle / History / Wartime nationalism: 1937–1949
caption_attribution_description: 中文（简体）‎: 20世纪40年代，李维汉在延安
context_page_description: The Theory of National Struggle, or Ethnic Struggle, is one of Mao Zedong's political theories on the application of Marxism in China. This theory is also Mao Zedong's remedy to the "National Question" in Marxist theory. As a subset of the general philosophy of Mao Zedong Thought, the theory of national struggle addresses the question of how classical Marxist-Leninist ideas of political economy should intersect with China's particular need for constructing a multi-ethnic national sovereignty without abandoning the universality of Marxism-Leninism. The gist of Mao's theory is that Chinese communists should treat the question of national and ethnic liberation in China as a subset of the larger socialist project of class conflict. In strategic terms, this means that the key to constructing a multiethnic Chinese nation-state is to mobilize and transform "backward" ethnic minorities into modern subjects of proletariat class consciousness under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
  Mao's political theory of "Nation Struggle" works in tandem with his theory of history, "New Democracy".
context_section_description: The third phase was the "New Democratic revolutionary phase" (July 1937 – October 1949). This phase of theoretical development is marked by the consolidation of Mao's political theory as the party orthodoxy during the war against Japanese Invasion (also called the Second Sino-Japanese War) from 1931–1945 and the subsequent war against the nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. During this period, Mao's political theory on ethnic sovereignty radically departed from the earlier Leninist approach that addressed the primacy of ethnic self-determination within the framework of Soviet Socialist Confederation. Moreover, Mao dissented from Stalin's approach to the "National Question" which emphasized the creation of a Russia-centric Soviet Union ("Socialism in one country"). On April 13, 1941, the Soviet Union signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact (Japanese: 日ソ中立条約 Romaji: Nisso Chūritsu Jōyaku), also known as the Japanese–Soviet Non-aggression Pact (Japanese: 日ソ不可侵条約 Romaji: Nisso Fukashin Jōyaku) with Japan two years after the brief Soviet–Japanese Border War (1939) As a retaliative reaction against USSR's non-aggression treaty with the Japanese Empire and Stalin's diplomatic recognition of Chiang Kai-shek as the head of China, Mao abandoned the USSR model of ethnic self-determination for the establishment of a unitary Chinese nation that would grant ethnic minorities partial ethnic autonomy under the Han-Chinese dominated CCP.
  According to historian James Leibold, Mao's new ethnic-autonomy theory necessitated the construction of a new cultural narrative of what "China" consists of demographically, geo-politically, and ethnographically. Mao's search for a nativist unity of the Chinese nation led to the theorization of a transitional phase of revolution that is absent in any other Marxist works outside of China. In Mao's theory of history, the stage of "New Democracy" is a transitional phase of interclass and interethnic unity before the seizure of state power by the Chinese Communist Party. In terms of the political ideal of "national struggle" and the theory of ethnic relationships, Mao proposed the construction of Ethnic Self-Autonomous prefectures under CCP leadership, deviating from the CCP's early conception of a loose multi-ethnic confederation as well as the so-called "fascist" conception of Han-centric homogeneous nationhood by the KMT.
  The CCP's theoretical departure from the USSR was accompanied by a series of institutional transformations. One of which was the establishment of a distinctively Chinese bureaucratic agency named the United Front Work Department (UFWD) (Chinese: 中共中央统战部), dedicated to the regulation of ethnic relations and the preservation of national sovereignty under CCP leadership. The UFWD was created in Yan'an in 1942 during the height of the Second-Sino Japanese War. Although the UFWD was originally designed exclusively to deal with ethnic problems and contrive strategies to mobilize non-party local elites for the war against Japanese invasion, the UFWD shifted its strategic focus to the antagonization of KMT and the mobilization of ethnic minorities for national unification after the defeat of Japanese empire in 1945. Until 1949, the UFWD dealt exclusively with the question of National Struggle in China, with its 9th Department and 10th Department specifically devoted to the regulation of wartime Sino-Tibetan and Sino-Uighur relationships. In 1942, Li Weihan, the head of the UFWD, issued a strategic report to the CCP's Yan'an headquarters. In a report titled "Research on the Ethnic Question (1942)" (Chinese: 民族问题研究; Pinyin: Minzu wenti yanjiu) Li asserted that it was the responsibility of the "modern" Han majority, as China's ruling "Minzu" (ethnic group), to guide the Mongol, Hui, Tibetan, and other "backward minzus" toward their collective liberation and to foster the right environment in which "natural assimilation" (Chinese: 自然同化) could forge a new, more evolutionarily robust national people. This argument was predicated on the assumption that ethnic minorities could skip stages of econo
caption: Li Weihan (1896–84), a member of the 6th Politburo of the CCP and the head of the UFWD.
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